I feel truly sorry for people who are living large off and within the film / TV industry and at the same don’t really get the love and worship factor.

Ask Martin Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino: Film is a faith — a religious order, and either you wear the monk robes or you don’t. I never detected the slightest indication that the hard-nosed Nikki Finke understood or believed this.

At their best (5% or 10% of the time) movies are vessels of art and joy and nurture, and before the terrible plague of the last few years (relentlessly empty, soul-smothering Millennial/Zoomer streaming “content” + flooding of farmlands with Marvel/D.C. fanboy crap + mass suffocation from the pandemic + woke gulag Stalinism) theatres were hallowed places of communal worship and self-recognition or at least some form of intimate observance.

To regard and define Hollywood (filmmaking, promotion, distribution) strictly as a dollars-and-cents power game is a philistine distraction. To many of us the game, or more precisely the calling, is much bigger and deeper than that.